


(Lose Your Clothes and) Show Your Scars

by CatiDono



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Drinking, Established Jim Moriarty/Sebastian Moran, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Gen, Grieving John, Grieving Sebastian, Inspired by Music, John Watson Thinks Sherlock Holmes is Dead, Mentions of Sex, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-19 13:12:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15510627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatiDono/pseuds/CatiDono
Summary: John's drunk in a bar.  Seb "just happens" to be drunk in the same bar. Jim's not around to tell Seb he'd be an idiot to make contact.





	(Lose Your Clothes and) Show Your Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [writerjesus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerjesus/gifts).



> Idk why the bae keeps getting me ShipWrecked but here we go again..... Y’all’d best listen to “Exit Wounds” by the Script before you read this bad boy. Get the full spectrum of ouchies.  
> (No this has nothing to do with my other fic that is actually titled Exit Wounds... that one was named after fanart. This one is song lyrics :P )

Seb sat in the corner and stared. If Doctor Watson had been less soused, his soldier’s instincts might have informed him that he was being watched. As it was, Seb was surprised John was still at the bar and not under it.  Not that Seb was much better. 

He drained his glass, feeling the whiskey scorch his throat.  It tasted like ass, because as much as Jim had tried, he’d never been able to break Seb of his habit of drinking shit liquor.  With Jim around, Seb had defaulted to whatever Jim was having, usually something with a patently scottish name and at least three digits in the price tag.  But since Jim wasn’t exactly around to criticize Seb’s alcohol choices anymore, he was back to the bottom shelf. Seb’s fingers tightened on the glass.

At the bar, John was arguing with the bartender.  She’d apparently decided that John couldn’t have another drink until he sobered up a bit, and maybe had some food.  Smart woman. Seb rose slowly, making sure his walk was as coordinated as he could manage, and made his way over. John was on the very last stool by the wall, and there was a nice little pocket of open space around him.  Probably because even the mundane pub crowds of London could recognize a grieving man when they saw one. Seb didn’t usually have company at the bar either.

“I’ll take it from here,”  Seb said to the bartender, sliding into the seat beside John.

“Excuse me?”  John’s speech was impressively clear, given how much gin he’d already consumed.  His gaze was hazy, but trained almost unwaveringly on Seb’s face. “Who the hell are you?”

“I thought I’d buy you a drink, but since you’ve already been cut off, maybe not,”  Seb said lightly, giving the friendliest smile he could manage.

“Why would you do that?”  John’s eyes raked down his body.  “Listen, mate, you’re cute, but I’m not looking for a shag.  Sod off.” The bartender took advantage of their argument to slip silently away, relieved of her moral crisis by Seb’s intervention.  Ignoring John’s words, Seb carefully set his own glass down on the bar.

“Man like you?  He only drinks like this on two occasions.  When his wife’s left him, or when he’s just lost a close friend.”  Seb gave John his own once over, as if he was appraising him. As if he hadn’t been watching John from the moment he walked in. “You don’t look like you’ve been married, which leaves the friend.”

John’s eyes had narrowed to slits as Seb talked, and now he fisted a hand in Seb’s shirt.  There was a high possibility that he’d been aiming for the collar but missed. “You don’t know a thing about me.  You think you can just walk in here and-” John cut himself off and took a deep breath, obviously trying to keep his temper under control.  

Interesting, Seb thought, the facets of a man’s personality brought out in him by liquor.  John, it seemed, was an angry drunk. Seb wasn’t; it was one of the few things about him that had surprised the great James Moriarty.  He didn’t get mad, just stupid. If Jim was here, he’d be shrieking in Seb’s ear about compromising himself and endangering the game. But the game was over, Seb couldn’t be much more compromised, and he had a deep, indefinable need for someone to understand him.

“Friend,” Seb asked softly, “or lover?”  John’s eyes snapped up to meet his, and wasn’t that an interesting tidbit.  Seb owed Jim twenty quid, because it turned out the doctor and the detective had been fucking after all.  If only Jim were around to collect payment.

“What-” John started, but then he stopped himself.  He looked at Seb, really looked, and Seb’s skin prickled.  It was a paler version of the look Holmes had been a master of, a snap assessment that did its best to sum up everything Seb was in one breath.  It was more than a little unsettling, and he held still as John slowly let go of his shirt.

“Who’ve you lost?” John asked softly.  “Friend or lover?” 

And that was it.  Seb felt his throat tighten, his control slip.  Both. Both and more. The only thing that kept him from breaking down right there was the thought of the look on Jim’s face if he could see Seb bawling like a child in front of the enemy.

“Ah.”  John turned away, setting his hands on the bar like he needed to anchor himself.  “Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to yell.” Unexpectedly, a small chuckle escaped his lips.  “Just wasn’t expecting a stranger to see all that.”

“I know what to look for,”  Seb said, and it wasn’t even a lie.  He saw it in the mirror every morning.

“You reminded me of him just then,”  John said to his empty glass, swirling the ice in it like he could summon more liquor with the motion.  “Just a little.”

“How long ago did you lose him?”  Seb asked even though he knew, because that was how long he’d been without Jim.  This conversation was like slowly tearing out a fingernail, pulling the sutures out of a wound one by one.  Destructive, with only one end result. Seb couldn’t have walked away from it if he’d wanted to.

“Five days, six hours, and twenty-three minutes.”  John met his gaze, and Seb saw himself reflected there, hurting and desperate for connection.  For someone to grieve with. “Yours?”

“Couple of weeks,”  Seb said, and again it was true. He’d lost Jim as soon as Sherlock had entered the picture. John’s eyebrows twitched a fraction, and Seb could practically read his thoughts on his face.   _ Couple of weeks and he’s still like this, god help me _ .

“It was slow.”  Seb thumped his empty glass gently on the bar, watching the condensation shake its way towards the polished wooden surface.  “He just sort of. Slipped away from me. Couldn’t do a thing about it.” Seb blinked away the prickling at the corner of his eyes.  “God, I tried though.”

“Mine was fast.”  John’s voice was uneven, and not just because of the drink.  “One minute he was there and then just. Gone.”

Seb nodded, not trusting himself to speak.  Silence fell around them for a long, heavy moment.

“Tell me about him?”  Seb said, and it was just like twisting a knife in his own leg.  He had to know, had to understand who this man was who had taken Jim from him so completely.

John glanced at him sidelong, blew out a long breath of juniper scented air.  “Clever. Very clever, cleverer than anyone else, and still such a child. Could tell you the street address of a man from the ash off his cigarette, but thought the sun went around the earth.”

Seb snorted, but it felt like shards of glass in his lungs.  He remembered reading that blog entry with Jim, how Jim had been so outraged by Sherlock’s idiocy that he’d stabbed his pocketknife through the arm of the sofa and then blamed Seb for it.  It had led to a lot of shouting, kissing, and rough sex. A good night.

“He a looker?”  Seb forced himself to keep talking like he’d forced himself to dig for a bullet in his leg the last time he’d gotten shot.

“Lot of people thought so, yeah.  One lady he worked with always said he looked a bit like an alien, though.”  John’s mouth twitched, a smile that usually sat well on his face not quite finding purchase.  “He was all right, I guess. When he wasn’t looking down his damn nose at me.”

“What’d he do for a living?” Seb doesn’t know why he’s asking all of these questions. He knows the answers, and he still doesn't understand  _ why _ .

“Piss off the government, mostly.”

Seb was startled into a genuine laugh at that.  It was probably true too, he thought, remembering the arguments between the Holmes brothers that he’d watched through the scope of a rifle. John seemed comforted by the sound, but it died in Seb’s throat as he remembered the time Jim, exhausted, sleep-addled, curled up against Seb’s side, had told him his laugh was nice.  Seb had never gotten the courage to ask if Jim had really meant it. Now he would never get the chance.

“No,”  John murmured into the silence, before Seb could pull himself together enough to speak.  “That’s not fair. Mostly he made people think things would be all right. Made me think things would be all right.”  John drew aimless patterns on the bar with the condensation off his glass, and Seb knew he was avoiding eye contact. “He just had this way of carrying himself.  Like he knew what was going on, and if he didn’t, he would find out, and nobody was going to stop him. Made him come off like an ass most of the time, of course, but it was because he  _ cared _ .”  John swallowed, and his voice was thick as he continued.  “Didn’t want anyone to know, but he did care, in his own way.”

Seb nodded in agreement, but he wasn’t thinking of Sherlock Holmes.  He was thinking of a fresh bottle of painkillers on the bedside table, and a pantry that sometimes, when Seb’s night had been truly awful, mysteriously sprouted a box of chocolate Pop Tarts.  Of a genuine psychopath who had inexplicably taken possession of a dishonorably discharged colonel and decided to keep him.

“Tell me about yours too?”  John asked suddenly, a rawness in his voice that made Seb’s throat ache in sympathy. It was the voice of a man who screamed into empty rooms at night, looking for an explanation he would never get.

“Mine? God.”  Seb laughed again, and if there was a little hitch to his breathing in the middle, John didn’t comment.  “Absolute neat freak. Would go to work, get absolutely covered in filth, and then expect me to clean up every speck of grime when he came back and tracked it through the house.”  Dry blood ground into white carpets, and Jim would bitch about it like he wasn’t the one who put it there.

“What did he do?”

“Construction.”  Jim had built an empire, and then thrown it all away for one man.  One man who wasn’t Seb. Not that Seb would ever have asked Jim to step down from his throne, but the bitterness was thick on his tongue regardless.

“Bit of an odd job for a neat freak.”  John’s eyebrows twitched again, and his mouth curved into a bemused smile that somehow softened every tired line of his face.  

“He was a bit of an odd man.”  

“How’d you two meet?”

“An ad in the paper, if you can believe it.”  Seb wished he’d thrown that paper in the bin the moment he’d picked it up, but he knew he didn’t mean it.  “Started working for him, then a month later he kissed me, then a week later I moved in.” The bones of the story were so bare and clean that there was nothing for John to pick over.  There was more, of course, much more. The shouting, and the nonsensical arguing over Seb working with Jim’s female employees. The time Seb had gotten in the car after a kill and met Jim-from-IT, fresh from the club in all his leather and glitter glory.  The way Jim had held a knife to Seb’s stomach and casually told him not to gut himself as he leaned in for that first lazy kiss. But John didn’t have a right to know any of that.

“You were dating your boss?”  There’s a faint note of surprise in John’s tone, but no judgement.

“Dating’s a strong word for it, but yeah.”  Seb shrugged. “After a certain point, it didn’t really matter who was in charge.  Left all that outside the door.” In the hallowed space of the bedroom, there was no consulting criminal, no hired hitman.  Just Jim and Seb, doing things to each other no sane person would do. Seb didn’t realize he’d been smiling softly until John smiled back at him.

“Must have been nice.”

“Yeah.  Yeah, it was good, mostly.  Had our shaky moments, but it was good.”  The word didn’t even begin to cover what he’d had with Jim, but it was enough to get by.

Seb flattened his left hand on the bar, spreading the fingers wide.  Jim had been very fond of playing the table-stabbing game, with his knife and Seb’s fingers, of course.  Relinquishing the comfort of his long empty glass, Seb tapped a silvery scar running from the middle joint of his pinky almost to his wrist.  “He tried to show me how to use some of his tools once, gave me this. He was torn up about it for days.” Of course he had been; Seb’s range had dropped by fifty meters when he had to shoot righty.  By the end of the day, Jim stabbing him had ended up as Seb’s fault too.

John huffed out a laugh, seemed surprised by himself  With one hand, he worked up the side of his jumper, exposing two red discs of scar tissue above his hip.  Seb raised an eyebrow.

“Is that a gunshot wound?”

“Idiot used to take a beretta to the walls when he was bored.”  The fondness in John’s voice made Seb want to sob. Seb let himself think in those tones, but they were never to be spoken out loud.  “One day I said I was going out, but didn’t leave when he thought I did. Somehow, even though I’m the one who ended up in the hospital, the whole thing was my fault.”

“Makes sense to me,” Seb said somberly, and John managed to meet his gaze for a few seconds before they both started chuckling.

“God.  I miss him.”  John’s voice was rough, and when Seb looked at him, he saw unshed tears shining in his eyes.  The sight made Seb irrationally angry.

“Bet he would be raving that you’re spending all your time pissing drunk in bars.  I know mine would threaten to cut my balls off if I didn’t shape up.”

“Sherlock would never,”  John gasped, but he was smiling again.  Then he registered what he’d said and glanced at Seb, wariness seeping into his posture.

“Don’t look like that.  ‘Course I figured out who you’re talking about,”  Seb admitted, trying to look abashed. “Was all over the news and everything.  Bad business. Shouldn’t have turned out like that.” Jim should have come home to him in a cab, not a body bag.

After another moment of suspicion, John sighed, relaxing back onto his barstool.  “I forget sometimes, the news, the interviews. It was so put on. He liked people to think he was sharp, but he hated the paparazzi.  Just didn’t have the people skills for it.”

“Mine used to have an act for the guys at work all the time, talk big, get in fights.  Then he’d come home and try to do the same to me. I wouldn't put up with it, of course, and that really got him going.”

_ If you’re insubordinate one more time- _

_ Sure, Boss, you’ll cut my trigger finger off.  But then who’ll shoot the good guys for you? _

_ No one is indispensable, Moran. _

_ ‘Course not.  But as annoying as I am, it’s more trouble to get a new sniper than it is to put up with me, isn’t it? _

_ Shut up and get on the bed. _

“What was his name?”  John asked, and Seb jolted out of his memories to see John  watching him, a strange expression on his face.

“Jim.”  Seb didn’t know why saying that one word should be so hard, but he could hardly get it out.  He bit his lip, stared at the bottles behind the bar until they started to blur. “His name was Jim.”  He blinked, and the blurriness got stuck in his eyelashes until he finally gave in and wiped his face on his sleeve.  After all, Jim had impressed on him numerous times that a sniper should always keep his vision clear.

“Sounds like he was a handful.”  John’s fingers were warm where they clasped Seb’s shoulder.  “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

“Same,”  Seb managed, and fuck, he meant it.  He desperately  _ was  _ sorry that their two geniuses ever met, because of course it was going to end in tragedy. How else could it be when two stars collided?

“Do you want to…”  John frowned, bit his lip, moved his hand back into his own space.  “Nevermind.”

“Changed your mind about the shag?” Seb asked with half a laugh, but the amusement faded away when John glanced up at him with dark eyes.

“Might have.”

Seb hesitated.  Part of him wanted to take John to his bed and pound him into the mattress until every trace of Jim was gone.  Get mud on the hardwood and scuff the carpets and break some ancient pottery. Leave Jim as thoroughly as Jim had left him.  But Jim had been so much  _ more _ than just sex, and a quick fuck wasn’t going to keep Seb’s heart from bleeding out all over the floor.

“I can’t.”  Seb met John’s fractured gaze, and knew that he understood.  “I can’t leave him yet.”

“Neither can I,”  John said, and he sounded exhausted.  “But god I wish I could sometimes.” 

Seb didn’t have anything to say to that, so he paid for his drinks and got his coat.  It was time to go, before he sobered up enough to do something really stupid.

“Wait.”

Seb turned back to John, who was sitting a little straighter, clearly struggling to fight off the alcohol.

“I’m John.  What’s your name?”

Seb wanted to laugh.  His name was an afterthought, as always.  Even in death, Jim came first. And maybe that was how it should be.  

“Doesn’t matter, John.  You won’t see me again.”  Without looking back, Seb stepped out onto the street and let the door slam behind him.  

**Author's Note:**

> Lemme know in the comments if you want the variation where they DO have "getting over him" sex, and/or the variation where John finds out who Seb is and everything is even worse!  
> (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *  
> if there's interest and the spirit moves me, maybe I'll write it....


End file.
